By Atia Tilarious Azohnwi
Behind a velvet rope and a set of double doors on the top floor of the Mapom Building, glossy marble gives way to a staircase tiled in green. After signing the visitor’s book and undergoing security checks at the foot of the staircase, gold plaited frames, fine sculptures art and craft works flash in your eyes as you move up. And then the white and indigo painted walls will surely not miss your fancy, the class reserved for presidential precincts. This is Joshua Osih‘s campaign headquarters.
The campaign office, which is an imposing one story building at Carrefour Ideal, Down Town Akwa in Douala, will be ground zero for the Osih Campaign for the October 7, 2018 Presidential Elections.
With its color-coded woolen carpet floor plan and handmade signs hanging from the walls, Joshua Osih’s campaign headquarters sprawls across a maze of cubicles and shared desks filling an entire floor of the Mapom Building in Cameroon’s steaming economic capital, Douala. There is a restaurant, a spacious restroom, befitting kitchen and every facility to keep the scores of strategists and volunteer focus on the win. Defined by youth, ambition and smarts, the largely youthful crew here is the most advanced digital, policy, analytics and communications operation since the return to multi-party politics in 1990.
Joshua Osih Nambangi, flag bearer of the Social Democratic Front, SDF party in the October 7 elections launched the campaign headquarters in Douala on August 16. The campaign headquarters is managed by Dr. Henri Nanda, longtime SDF diehard. It is from this office that the website and digital app for the candidate’s campaign has been developed. It is also here that all communication content is developed and spread across social media platforms under the watchful eyes of Jean Pierre Boep, the communication, media and digital team leader. The campaign team says they have a good rapport with the party. They have also launched an operation to have Cameroonians support financially the campaigns of their darling candidate.
As we walk through the campaign headquarter on Monday, September 10, 2018, Hon. Fobi Nchinda Simon makes a stop to measure the working tempo and feed his eyes with the presidential nature of the campaign office of their presidential candidate.
It was a satisfied Member of Parliament for Bamenda-Bali Constituency who talked to The SUN Newspaper. “I am extremely happy and impressed by the work that the team is doping. You can see that it is a very dynamic team. If they continue, as I am sure they will, I am certain that on October 7, the country will get a very pleasant surprise with the election of our new president, Osih.”
Members of the team, just like Hon. Fobi Nchinda, are very confident of a win when polls close at 6:00pm on October 7. This hope is even further stressed as we are granted rare access into the cubicle for strategy. Her, we are shown the strength of the party’s candidate, but limited only to go with the knowledge that Osih’s victory is not in doubt.
But in a season that has upended all the rules and the advent of new media and crisis in the North West and South West Regions, such strength can also be a weakness. Overwhelming force can turn unwieldy, and Osih’s aides are working 16 hours a day, with focus on letting the candidates do exactly what is needed to harvest a landslide victory. When they campaign season opens on September 22, they may have to work round the clock until polling day when they may turn to compile the results that would have been trickling in.
Campaign headquarters have never won or lost a presidential campaign. But floor plans and their contents can be telling representations of the candidates themselves, windows into how they would likely govern if they won the Unity Palace. For Osih, the other eight candidates contesting the coveted office may just be no match. His option for a federal system of governance and wide range reforms of the economy and administration stands in a class of its own.
If you ask any one at the Osih campaign headquarters what they plan to do after the election, their response will likely be, “rest!” they apparently have no time to waste, not even candidate Osih or the charismatic SDF founding father and chairman, Ni John Fru Ndi. But none of these sacrifices will matter unless voters decide to make their voice heard on October 7 by massively turning out to vote for change.
Like Osih, 49, puts it: “Our challenge is to get rid of the incumbent who has destroyed the motto of peace-work-fatherland which he inherited from his predecessor. Cameroonians have given me their mandate to do that on October 7, 2018. There is no longer peace, work and fatherland and we will make sure that is restored as soon as the people make us President of the Republic.”